Co-Production with families with special educational needs and disabilities
Background
Need
Due to family feedback and peer reviews, the Children services in Ealing Council needed to improve co-production at an indivdual, service and strategic level, working towards an aligned co-production approach.
Role
Leading delivery and design elements of the project as part of a mulitdisciplinary team.
Users
Families with children aged 0 - 25 yrs in Ealing who experience additional or special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Timeline
April- May 25: From discussins with senior leaders, co-production emerged as an area of need
June 25: Work scoped and MDT created
July 25: Relationships built with stakeholders and desk research
Aug 25: Workshops with youg people to create a video explaining co-production
Sept 25: Co-production workshops with parents, partners and council staff
Sept-Dec 25: Testing the created approaches in specific services to iterate and improve
Design Process
Empathise
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Building relationships with Service Director, Leads and partners to undertand needs for co-production
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Strategic alignment and scoping work
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Gathering data on family needs with SEND such as joint straetgic needs assessments (JSNAs), peer reviews and co-produced reports.
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Desk and literature review of past co-production approaches and activities across the system
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Creating archetypes of SEND families and needs
Define
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Bringing data together to create an overview of work to date that can be shared with groups to form a new definiton of co-production and approach
Ideate
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Co-facilitatied workshops with young people with SEND to explore what co-production looks like to them, and develop together a video resource to guide practitioners
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Reflecting on sessions with young people, including care leavers to create a set of principles, definitions and approaches on what it takes to do excellent co-production
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Synthesising the outputs from working young people into a set of hypotheses that can be tested.



Prototype
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Turning co-production principles, definitions and approaches into training, and testing with different teams at different levels of design:
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Indivdual
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Service
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Strategic
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Iterate
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Take learnings from prototypes and bring to other parts of the Children's service area for continued tweaking to ensure the outcome is appropriate for all customer auidences.
